


Laborare Est Orare

by gloriousthorn



Category: Andrew Hozier-Byrne (Musician), Celtic Mythology, Work Song - Hozier (Song)
Genre: "reunions"? yeah you could say that, F/M, Inspired by a Hozier Song, Reunions, it took me like three weeks to write half of this, too tired to come up with snarky tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-10-30 18:04:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17833484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloriousthorn/pseuds/gloriousthorn
Summary: When death was imminent, he made a deal with the most powerful of the Old Ones: work off his debt for a hundred and fifty years, and pray that his love would wait for him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to rembrandtswife for ensuring that the first two chapters were readable after I couldn't look at them for one more second.
> 
> I never know what to do about archive warnings. Basically there are mentions of both rape and violence in here, but they're fairly fleeting and (I don't think) terribly graphic. BUT if those are triggers for you, you might want to move on.

I went to my knees— in pain, in hunger, in thirst, and, yes, in fear.

 

_Danu, éist le mo ghuí, le do thoil._

 

She came to me then, the old Mother of all, in a ribbon of blue light there in my prison cell.  She was more beautiful, and more ancient, than I’d imagined: hair as tangled as tree roots to her ankles; her robes ragged but made of luminous silk.  Stern, though perhaps not without a sense of humor. She stood at the foot of the bed, and then sat herself down. She stared at me— unblinkingly though not unkindly.  “Michael,” she said, her tone penetrating.

 

“Yes, Mother,” I said.

 

“I might have warned you not to do this.”

 

“I know.”

 

“You killed the man,” she said.  “You are unrepentant.”

 

I looked back steadily.  I ached from the beating I’d been given when they brought me in, from the lack of food and water that day.  But I had determined to be strong even knowing that I would have to prostrate myself before her. “Mother, I believe you to be merciful,” I said.  “I know you can destroy me. If you do, I can’t say I don’t deserve it. I don’t even deserve to ask for your clemency. But I believe it’s there.”

 

She considered me for a moment.  “I destroyed him, you know,” she said, the hint of a smile on her lips, like she hadn’t minded doing it.  “Made an exchange with his god. Hurled him into the great furnace. Without a second thought.”

 

I nodded.  I’d have liked to say more— _good taste in destruction you have, Mother—_ but I kept a respectful silence.

 

“You took vengeance into your own hands,” she said.  “I cannot overlook this.”

 

“I understand.”

 

“True, there is goodness in you yet,” she mused.  “But even if I were to spare you from destruction, there is the matter of _her._ ”

 

My cheeks burned even then— cold as I was, empty as I was— to hear and think of Brighid.  

 

“He might have had fifty years more to live,” she continued.  “One hundred and fifty years you owe, then. No matter how odious his crime.  And she will die before you can pay your debt.”

 

I lowered my head.  It was true, of course.

 

“Unless…” She tilts her head.  “I could intervene. If she asked.”

 

I sighed.  Brighid was unlikely to call on the Old Ones even in this particular situation.

 

“Or, at least, if she chose.”

 

“You would go to her?”

 

“I could.”  

 

All of the “ifs” and “coulds.”  My stomach growled; I dry-swallowed into my empty throat.  But I had to be patient. To rush her, I would disrespect her; at worst, I might run her off completely.   I kept my gaze averted, but I could feel hers on me: curious, inventive, even playful.

 

“Very well,” she said finally.  “You will work for me for one hundred and fifty human years.  I could certainly use a willing servant. Once you cross over and come to work for me, I’ll go to her and offer her the choice: to wait for you, in which case I will stay her aging and death until your debt is paid.  Or not, in which case she will pass on to her own god.”

 

“I would only want her to choose freely,” I said, cautiously, wondering what she had in mind.

 

She smiled.  “Of course,” she said, “you will also pay with your labor the price of the knowledge of how she chose.  And you will not have it until it is fully paid.”

 

 _So you get your labor either way,_ I thought.  Clever. Ensuring that I wouldn’t give up if I learned that Brighid chose not to wait for me.  I tried not to linger too long on the idea of serving her without any hope of reward. Still. It was certainly better than any other deal I’d get— not that I had a lot of time to find out, either.

 

I nodded.  “Thank you, Mother,” I said.  “I will serve you.”

 

“Very well.”  She held out her hand to me, and I kissed it.  

 

“I will see you soon, then,” she said.  “Come to me bravely.”

 

And with that, she and her blue light left me, in the dark prison cell.  Evening fell hard and early in the late autumn.

 

I rose from my knees, not easily.

 

*

 

So in the morning, when they sent the priest to me, I was already prepared.  I went through the motions of the confession, just as I had gone to Mass to keep my mother and then Brighid happy, but when I did not name the sin that had brought me to that place, the old father actually raised his discreetly bowed head.

 

“My son,” he said, “is there nothing else you wish to confess?”

 

“No, Father.”

 

“You are about to go to your eternal reward with a mortal sin on your soul.  Surely you wish to ask God’s forgiveness.”

 

“My conscience is at ease, Father.”

 

He widened his eyes.  I simply returned the stare.

 

After a few moments of silence, I said, “Frankly, Father, I’ve not been treated with any excess of gentleness during my imprisonment.  So I’m fairly anxious to die. Perhaps, then, we can be finished.”

 

“I cannot absolve you if you do not confess.”

 

“I don’t ask for absolution, Father.  Not for this. I regret the dishonor and poverty that will come to my family, the pain my death may cause Brighid—” I catch myself.  “I’ll make my Act of Contrition for the sins I’ve confessed, and then you can tell them I’m ready.”

 

The poor old father sucked in a long breath.  “My son,” he said. “Don’t do such a thing.”

 

But I’d already made my choice.

 

I bowed my head.  “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,” I murmured, “and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”  

 

And then I lifted my head and looked the old priest in his watery blue eyes.  “I am finished, Father.”

 

Reluctantly he dipped his thumb in the oil and made the Sign of the Cross on my forehead.  “God, the father of mercies through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to Himself and the sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins,” he said.  “May God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

 

“Amen,” I agreed.

 

He stood up and turned to the guards waiting outside my cell.  “We’re finished,” he said, woodenly, a bit stunned.

 

They unlocked the gate and led him out.  “May God have mercy on your soul,” he croaked.

 

I nodded.

 

They bound my hands and led me out to the scaffold, but they needn’t have worried.  I had no thought of resisting, not even as I saw my mother with her arm around my precious Brighid, shivering in the early morning chill.   _Come to me bravely,_ she had said.  I’d had no thought of doing otherwise.

 

They read out the charges against me.   _Murder most foul.  Sedition against an agent of Her Majesty’s government._

 

I caught Brighid’s eye.  She looked as though she hadn’t slept.  As though she’d been up all night weeping.  

 

*

 

We’d had trouble coming up with the taxes.  The tiny farm her family had fought so hard to hold during the Hard Times was barely in the black, sometimes not even that.  We’d sold off a parcel, then a second, and were trying to devise ways to avoid selling the cow.

 

Even then we were happy.  I don’t think we thought we’d fail.  The turnips would come in strong, we thought, just in time to bed down the growing fields for the winter, and we’d make the last of the taxes and have just a bit left over.  We ate carefully but we slept well, made love, hoped for children. I lived for the curve of her back in the candlelight as she took her hair down and brushed it every night, the warm scent of her filling the whole room, making me hungry for her soft belly and breasts and lips.  All as we were supposed to do.

 

The tax collector came one day when I’d gone to my mother’s to see to her jammed water pump.  She explained: _No, we don’t have it yet, waiting for the turnips to come in, you know.  But we’ll have it soon._

 

 _Perhaps,_ he’d said, running a finger down her cheek, _we could make other arrangements._

 

Drew herself back and up, all five feet of her.   _I’m a married woman.  You’ll get your money soon enough.  Good day to you._

 

_Come now.  We can do it quick enough._

 

She almost managed to get back inside.  Before she could barricade the door, he’d come in after her.  

 

I don’t know why he thought he’d get away with it.  Maybe he thought I’d gone farther than the other side of town.  But I was home hardly an hour later to find her crying on our bed, barely able— but able— to tell me what had happened.  

I sold my father’s watch to pay the tax bill.  I paid it in person and got a receipt. I didn’t want anyone mistaking what I planned to do as a way of avoiding my debts.  No, I paid my debts. And then I collected.

 

I gave her the tax receipt that evening.   _Don’t lose this,_ I told her before she said her prayers.  And then I said, _Pray for me._

 

 _I always do, love,_ she said.

 

I kissed her forehead.   _I love you._

 

_I love you too._

 

And I left.  I took my father’s scian and waited for the tax collector to stumble out of the pub, where he went in the evenings to collect money and intelligence and desperation.  I let him see my face. I wanted him to know, before I thrust the knife in his belly, that I knew.

 

I went home, where Brighid, who’d asked me no questions, was asleep.  I didn’t hide. I knew they’d find me. I just wanted to spend as much time as I had left as a free man in her arms.

 

*

 

She had come to the small window of my cell later that evening, after Danu had gone.  “Don’t be afraid,” I told her through the bars. “I’ll be coming home to you.”

 

“Ah, don’t say such foolishness,” she said between cries.  “Don’t give me false hope. Not now.”

 

I shook my head.  “Never.”

 

“What do you mean, then?”

 

“You’ll be visited in the coming days.  You’ll be offered a choice: to wait for me, or not.  There will be costs no matter what you decide—”

 

“All right, that’s enough.”  A guard on patrol came to the window.  “Move along, miss.”

 

“Choose what you will.  But don’t fear for me. I love you—”

 

“I love you, Michael, you know I do—”

 

“I said move along!”  He jabbed her with the butt of his rifle.

 

“The grave will never hold me,” I swore, calling after her as she drew her shawl around her and started to hasten away.

 

The guard gave a sardonic laugh.  “You’re a Papist,” he said. “You’re going to burn, sonny.”

 

I managed to grin, despite the hunger, the thirst, and the raw, fiery pain.  “I am no Papist,” I said. “And I will not burn.”

 

“We’ll just see about that,” he growled.

 

“You’ll know it when you don’t see me in hell,” I shot back.

 

“They can’t kill you soon enough,” he snapped.

 

“Oh,” I said, “I wholeheartedly agree.”

 

*

 

I held her gaze as they slipped the noose over my head.  

 

Just before they covered my face, I gave her a wink.

 

And then the world went black.

 

But only for a moment.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

I awoke on the floor of a deep forest, late autumn just as I’d left the world, trees tall and dry and nearly empty.  The sun was bright, if not warm. This I realized when the breeze blew— not only the hair on my head, but every bit of hair on my body, all of it exposed to the elements.

 

_ Well,  _ I thought,  _ this must be the place. _

 

I pushed myself to a sitting position with an ease that surprised me, and as I did so, she came to me.

 

“I healed your wounds before you awoke,” she said.  “You’re welcome.”

 

“Thank you, of course, Mother.”

 

She held out her hand to me.  But before I could kiss it, she said, “You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

 

I shook my head.

 

“Very well.”

 

I knelt and kissed her hand.  She smiled. She looked younger in the sunlight, true, but in her eyes I still saw her ageless power, the power to thwart or fulfill death.  And though I had come to her as bravely as I could, I thought, still I trembled inwardly to imagine what she had in mind for me to do.

 

She smiled.  “You have a shelter over there,” she said, pointing with her arm draped in her ragged and shimmering robes.  “You’ll find clothing, and food for a day, maybe two. After that you’ll provide for yourself.”

 

“Yes, Mother.  Thank you.”

 

“You’ll work from sunrise to sundown beginning tomorrow.  For every six days, a day of rest. I have some tasks in mind for you.”

 

“I’ll do what you ask.”

 

“Will you?” She sat down on a rock and settled her robes around her, and pointed a long finger towards me.  “When your body aches with exhaustion and hunger, and you still have to kill and skin and cook your dinner? When you mine all day and find nothing but rock and ash, or when you chop wood all day and have acres and acres left to go?  And when you don’t know what might await you at the end of your labors?”

 

“I called on you because I believed you would save me from death, not because I believed you were in the business of doing favors.  You told me your terms, and I agreed to them.”

 

She raised her eyebrows, then laughed, a long, warm cackle.  “Well, you’re not easily scared off, then,” she said. “Go, eat and rest.  Dying is hard on a person, so I’m told. I’ll see you in the morning.”

 

With that she was gone, and I picked myself up to go to the place she’d indicated: just a small house in the clearing, made of stone with a window on each wall.  It reminded me of a smaller version of our house— Brighid’s house, now, again. Poor girl.  _ For this, I’m sorry, love,  _ I thought.  

 

When would Danu go to her, give her some hope— if she wanted to take it?

 

*

 

I did rest, whatever rest was, and I was ready when Danu came back in the morning.  “Come,” she said as I walked out the door. “Your work awaits.”

 

I nodded.  As we walked, she said, almost offhandedly, “I’m going to see her today.”

 

“Thank you, Mother,” I said.

 

“You know, I don’t know her,” she said.  “Tell me about her, this woman. You’ve done a lot for her already, and it’s only just begun.  For her I really am doing a favor, for someone who’s never called on me. So tell me.”

 

Ah, what to say about Brighid.  Only everything about a girl I’d known most of my life, at least as long as I could remember.  “Let me tell you a story about her,” I said. “I came home from working the summer on a turnip farm in England three years ago.  Came home to find out my father had died while I was gone. Never said him a proper goodbye. He was a good man, my father. Broke his heart that we’d all been going off to England and America, only little Adrian left by the time I went.”  

 

She nodded.  

 

“I was furious at everyone and everything.  Furious that I’d had to leave, might have to leave again.  I took what little of the money I hadn’t given to my mother and drank it, for the better part of three days, and staggered off towards the woods early one morning— thinking to do what, who could say.  Maybe lie down and die. 

 

“Brighid was out gathering eggs.  She climbed the fence around the yard and seized me by my arm.  ‘Michael, what’s gotten into you?’” I shook my head. “Fairly dragged me into her house.  She was alone by then and it would have been a scandal if anyone had seen us, but she didn’t care.  I’d drunk myself into a fever and a frenzy and she kept me in her house until I came to my senses. She made me drink a raw egg.  She put me in her bed and slept on the floor beside me for two nights until I was sober, and clean, and in my right mind.” I looked at her.  “That’s who she is. She is goodness. Goodness at the risk of comfort, reputation— what people say they would risk but rarely do.”

 

She looked at me with curiosity.  “Goodness at the risk of comfort and reputation,” she mused.  “I think that bodes well, don’t you?”

 

I shrugged.  There was the matter of the one disharmony between us: her unshakeable devotion to the Church.  The Hard Times had disinclined me to believe in a benevolent god and the frauds who claimed to serve him, but Brighid had gone in the other direction, spending hours in prayer every day.  I remembered her praying over me that first day, even as I drunkenly begged her not to waste her breath. And I knew that she would never consent to go unwed, that to stay in her hand and her bed I’d have to go before the priest, and I did.  Of course, I didn’t anticipate things quite going this way, either.

 

We came to a cave then, a pickaxe leaning outside the entrance.  “These are my mines,” she said. “The coal fuels the furnace.”

 

I didn’t have to ask which furnace.  I lifted the heavy pickaxe.

 

“I’ll see you later,” she said.  “Work hard now. I’ll need the coal separated from the rock, and the bins filled by the end of the day.”

 

She turned and was gone, leaving me to traipse down into the mine, dark and dank and reeking of the powder-and-char scent of the coal.  There were three huge bins to be filled, and a basin of water, I assumed for me to drink.

 

Gamely I struck at a shimmering vein.  Nothing.

 

Again and again I struck until a chunk came free.  After I pried and dusted the coal from the surrounding rock, I dropped it in the bin.  

 

I would do this hundreds, thousands of times.  Hours passed. I emptied the basin of water but could not think of leaving to slake my thirst further; the bins filled so slowly and I’d no idea what would happen if I didn’t finish in time.  My shoulders ached; sweat dripped from my brow, soaked through my shirt, and ran down my arms to my hands, where I could feel blisters beginning to form already. 

 

But she’d gone to see Brighid.  I knew she wouldn’t tell me what she’d chosen.  I could only pray— to no one, I suppose, since she wasn’t listening:  _ Please let her be waiting for me.   _

 

*

 

I lay in our bed— my bed— our bed— alone, rosary beads wrapped around my hands, sobbing through the Sorrowful Mysteries.  I’d been weeping since I came home from the burial Mass. Sure, we hadn’t ever had much, but we’d had this— the house I’d grown up in, the house my parents died in, the articles that filled it that had lasted their lifetimes, the things we were able to add when Michael brought in a little extra money or Kevin sent some back from America.  The sheets and pillowcases Mam and I hemmed together for my hope chest when Michael was just another gangly boy in the village; his boots, his coat— what would I do with them? But we’d had all that. And each other.

 

When I’d well-near soaked the pillowcase and the red-gold light of the late afternoon had begun to fade, a sweep of blue light fell over my shoulder, behind me on the edge of the bed, flashing over the glazed picture of Our Lady of the Angels.  Started, I looked up to see—

 

“Blessed Virgin?” I gasped.

 

The source of the light— an old woman, as it turned out, not young and mild as I’d always pictured the Blessed Virgin, laughed.  “I am no virgin, blessed or otherwise,” she said. “I am the old mother your people once called Danu. You don’t call on me as you once did—”

 

“Michael did,” I whispered.

 

She nodded.  “He did. And I heard him.”

 

“He said I’d be visited.”

 

“Spoiling the surprise, I see.  Well, here I am.”

 

“And that I’d have a choice to make.”

 

“That you do.”

 

I sat up straight and fumbled for my handkerchief.  “How did he know?”

 

“We worked it out.”

 

“Is he—”

 

She lifted her eyebrows.  “His body is in the ground.  You saw it laid there.”

 

“If that was the whole truth, you wouldn’t be here.”

 

“Clever girl.  I can see why he was willing to deal for you.”

 

“Tell me where he is.”

 

“Tell you where he is?” She laughed.  “Already giving orders. I know you don’t know any better, worshipping the foreigners’ god as you do, but my.”

 

“Please?  I’m— sorry, I—?”

 

“So much for pious, lovely Brighid.”

 

“Pious and lovely?”  I pushed some stray hairs back from my forehead, embarrassed and a bit rattled to hear her say my name.  “That sounds like the kind of thing he’d come up with.”

 

She smiled.  “Well. You have some sense already, then.”  She paused. “True, his body is in the ground.  But I have stayed his return to earth. He is in a realm beyond, for now.  What happens to him next is in some ways up to you.”

 

“To me?” I brushed the last of the tears from my eyes.  “Why?”

 

“No matter how— noble his motives may have been for doing what he did, he took a life.  Yet I’m fond of him. So I took him to myself and arranged for him to work off his debt for a time.”  She paused, and her face, almost imperceptibly, softened, for a moment. “And I know you were wronged.  Perhaps I’d like to restore you, in some way, inasmuch as it’s possible.”

 

“How long will you keep him?”

 

“How long would be too long?”

 

I looked out the window.  The sun was setting below the hill, a mile or so away.  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I might have fifty years to live.  Maybe less, now. Who can say.”

 

“What if you had more?” She tilted her head, as if she was really interested in my answer.  “How long would you wait for him to come back to you?” 

“You ask me this today?  Mere hours after I buried him?  He was my  _ husband.   _ I’d wait forever.”

 

“I don’t ask for forever.  That’s a long time for your kind.  One hundred and fifty years in your time.”

 

My mouth might well have dropped open.  “A hundred and fifty years,” I repeated dumbly.  “Why, I’ll be an old woman. Older than old. Older than any old woman I’ve ever known and then some.”

 

“Oh, come now, I’d make it worth your wait.  I’m keeping his young body nice and cozy in the ground.  I can do the same for you up above.”

 

“Up above?  I’ll die before supper if I could be with him again.  Lord knows I thought about it for a moment or two. Just take me wherever he is now.”

 

She shook her head.  “Dying is too easy,” she said.  “No, I want you to wait. I want you to feel the life of the earth, the seasons for the coming decades.  Pray to whatever god you like, but understand the earth that’s holding your love for the moment— the earth that will outlive you all eventually, the earth your kind disregards more with each passing year.  You’ll have a long time. Honor the earth, and I’ll keep him safe and young for you until his debt is paid.”

 

She smiled— an unearthly smile, not kind, but not malevolent.  Curious. “So,” she said. “I’ll ask you only once. What will it be?”

 

I hesitated.  To make a bargain with this— Old One, I supposed— was it a temptation, a sin?  Surely it was unnatural. And what would I  _ do _ for a hundred and fifty years?  Eke out a living, on my own, on what remained of the farm without even the sweet relief of death and heaven to hope for?  

 

And yet.  To see him again— and not just to see him, but see him in his body, restored, young.  I remembered when he came back from England, when he’d drunk himself nearly to death, and I brought him here to clean him up and talk some sense into him.   _ You can’t do this to your mother,  _ I’d told him.   _ She needs you.   _ When he was clean, and right with himself again, he dressed himself in the clothes I’d washed and pressed, combed his wet hair that had grown too long.  I realized then what a beautiful man he was, how tall and strong and light-brown-freckled he was after all that time working in the sun. What I didn’t say until much later was,  _ I need you too, you hotheaded heathen.  After all these years, I can’t live without you.   _

 

I looked down at the rosary beads still wrapped around my hand.   _ Forgive me,  _ I prayed.

 

I looked up at her.  She was waiting for an answer.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One hundred fifty years is a long time.

I spent the first hundred years mining coal.  Every night I went to bed with my back and shoulders aching, the skin on my hands broken and bloody; every morning I woke up new to go back down in her hellish mines.  I was beginning to struggle to remember a time when my body, however it was currently constituted, hadn’t been in pain at the end of the day. On my days of rest I slept, tried to store up some food for the coming days.  I couldn’t do much else. I was too tired to even wonder what I might read or play or sing. I lived in mortal fear of not completing the work every day.

 

True: it was not hell.  The days were long, but they did end.  I did find myself healed. I ate, I drank.  (I pleasured myself, when I had the energy.)  Birdsong woke me in the morning; owls and doves called in the night.  I didn’t know where else I might go, but still I went willingly to the mine each morning, knowing, even long after I lost count, that each day brought me closer to Brighid, closer to home.  

 

Still I lived uneasy that with each thrust of the axe, I was fueling the destruction of souls perhaps more evil than mine but perhaps simply less lucky or ingenious.  I had mined ton upon ton of coal after a century, every heart-sized fistful of the shimmering dark ore set to consume the damned. Most days, I had to remind myself that I’d consigned my judgment to hers— that if she would destroy the man who destroyed the fragile happiness Brighid and I had built, then her judgments were, to borrow from Scripture, true and righteous altogether.  But sometimes I caught the scent of it, like burning but much worse. It wasn’t the warm, clean smell of an autumn bonfire, or even the close but ultimately comforting odor of the coal stove at home. It was the smell of an entire world burning, of whatever lies over or beyond flesh— acrid, bitter, filthy.

 

The hope of somehow crawling home to Brighid at the end of all of it felt, some days, more distant than others.  Once day was particularly hard on my hands. I’d gradually learned that the less I thought about it, the more I could hold off the pain.  But I dwelt on it for some reason that day, and whatever my flesh was, it was betraying me then. I stopped to drink (I’d gotten a little better at rationing my water, and still had some left in the bowl) and could barely grasp it for my bloody palms. I nearly threw the bowl to the ground.  I put it back, sank to my knees, and let myself weep for the first time in nearly a hundred years.

 

She came to me then.  She did not touch me, or say anything for a long moment.  She let me cry in rage, in exhaustion, as she seated herself on some tall cushion she materialized.  Finally she said, “You chose this.”

 

“I know it.”

 

“You are tired.”  She considered me, but kept me at arm’s length.  “Perhaps this was too much to ask of you.”

 

“What choice do I have?”

 

“Very little, now.”  She sighed. “I can give you rest, but that is all I can give you.  Give you back to your body, back to the earth. Nowhere for your spirit to go but a great limbo, with debts to this world unpaid, and so nothing for your body to do but turn back to dust.”

 

“He violated her, Mother.  Our home. Everything we worked to preserve.”

 

“I do not dispute it.  Still, you took vengeance.  Even the foreigners’ god would agree that we do not give our powers of justice into human hands lightly.”  Her gaze was hard— not cruel, perhaps, but there was no tenderness in it. “You agreed, did you not, that I would have been right to destroy you also?”

 

I lowered my face, then nodded.

 

“So here you are.  And here you will stay until your debt is paid.”  She shook her head, but her look softened slightly.  “Tell me again why you chose this. Given the choice, even now, to rest, to simply give up— even to be spared destruction— you choose to stay.”  She stroked my chin, her touch surprisingly gentle. “Tell me. Tell me about her.”

 

I dashed the rest of the tears from my eyes with the blackened heels of my hands and thought for a moment.  “When they were seizing all the cattle, presumably for tax payment but of course for export,” I said, “her family desperately wanted to keep a cow.  The assessors would come around and someone would tip them off— they gave away milk all the time, they were generous folk— and Brighid would end up taking the cow off to walk in the woods.  Once, when it fell to me to go to her house, I decided to go with her.

 

“She was so still, and unafraid.  Like always. She knew exactly what to do and did it.  I sat with her while she sat on a rock and worked on her knitting and watched the cow graze in a little clearing, and she prayed— out loud, with great sincerity— for the _cow._ ‘God, keep her safe for us and everyone who depends on her.’”  I shook my head. “For her parents. For the bleeding English, even, that God forgive them for their ignorance and covetousness.”  I paused. “For me. That I wouldn’t have to go. She knew I didn’t want to. And the first time I left, she promised she’d pray for me to come back.”

 

I sighed.  “I know you won’t tell me what’s become of her,” I said.  “If she’s waiting or not. But I know for certain she prayed for me, after you went to see her.  And she waited for me before. So I hope. I really do.”

 

She folded me in her arms.  I’d no idea what it might mean.  But I laid my head in her lap and let her hold me there for a long minute, just like I was a child again and she really was my mother.  I’d abandoned her too, of course, but she had Adrian, who would stay with her. Brighid had no one. It was true, what I’d said to the priest.  That I regretted. For that I was atoning as much as the act itself.

 

“I can take you out of here,” she said finally.  “I have other work you can do in the coming days.”

 

“Thank you, Mother.”

 

She rested her hand on my forehead like she was checking me for a fever.  “Finish your work,” she said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll have something else for you.”

 

I nodded and got to my feet.  She stood, her cushion vanishing into thin air.  In the low light she looked older than ever.

 

“Wherever she may be,” she said, “pray for her too.  Pray for a goodness that deserved your honor. For the woman who risked for you.  Whatever she chose, pray your thanks that you knew her goodness at all.”

 

What could I do but agree?  I said that I would.

 

She left me then, and I took up the pickaxe again, driving into the glistening vein, drawing out the blood of the old earth.

 

*

 

_I don’t ask for forever,_ she told me.   _Forever is a long time for your kind._ But as it turns out, fifteen decades is quite long enough.  And when you live on a small property in a small town, there are very few secrets, and if you need to keep one, you can’t very well sit at your kitchen window and watch chicks hatch and leaves change for over a century.  

 

After about ten years, I didn’t look any different, as the girls I’d grown up with (the ones who were still alive and around, anyway) started to go gray and bear one babe after another.  Everyone was too kind to me, of course, to notice anything amiss or say anything about it if they did. Sometimes piteously so. Their kindness reminded me at every turn of what I had lost, which felt like nearly everything.  (I was ashamed of that sometimes, too, and prayed over it. We’d managed to hold the farm for so long, and I held it after everything happened as well, and folks lost everything, not only land and house but sons and daughters.)  Even after everything that had happened, I was luckier than most.

 

Michael’s young brother Adrian helped as much as he could, and if he noticed anything strange about me, he kept his peace.  But it became clear to me that the best thing to do was leave. Eventually there would be talk. Adrian could be trusted with the farm; he wanted to marry and stay near their mother.  

 

“I don’t need your rent money,” I told him over tea one afternoon.  “Do what you like with the place but don’t sell, no matter what. I’m leaving instructions with the bank to forward you cash if you need it— there isn’t much, but if you come up short on the taxes or whatnot, it’s there.  I’ll be back.”

 

“Brighid, are you well?” he asked, setting down his cup.  “This is generous, of course, and I’m grateful, but— where will you go?  What will you do?”

 

“England, maybe America.”

 

He laughed, a bit sadly.  “It would break his heart to see you go.”

 

“Don’t I know it.”  

 

We were silent for a moment.  I looked out the window to the yard where I still kept the chickens, then back across the house to the bed where I’d laid him when he’d had his dark time.

 

“But it’s the best thing for now,” I said.  “I’ll be able to come home as long as you hold the place, and I know you will.”

 

He nodded.  “I will.” And we shook on it like men.  

 

For twenty years I went to America, boarding with other young women working in the garment factories in New York.  I walked in the parks and along the waterfront when I could, noting the circular departures and arrivals of geese, the flowering and unleaving of the trees, so many of which were still young then.  I saved every penny I could for Adrian and his rapidly growing family and my return home. I came back to find him a thicker, happier man, living in my house with his wife, his mother, and three of their seven children.  Thirty-five years that was.

 

His mother was near death by then, and I was with her when she died.  “What did you do, Brighid?” she asked me plainly one day, not long before she passed.

 

“Oh, you know.  Worked in factories in New York.”

 

“That’s not what I mean.”

 

“Whatever do you mean, then?”

 

“You’ve— you might have met a man over there.  Married again, had a family. No one would begrudge you.  You were so young.”

 

“I don’t need another husband.”

 

“But you— ”

 

She knew, something.  She knew I should have come back tired, age spots on my stiff hands from sewing six days a week, the color faded from my hair.  But she couldn’t have begun to guess. She was tired herself, having outlived her husband and five of her children. She went to her reward, and I went to England, working first as a maid and then saving up enough to learn secretarial work.

 

I stayed there until the Republic, another twenty years, and by then most anyone who might have known or cared about us was dead or gone.  I laughed to myself when I voted for the first time of many in my life, how delighted Michael might be to see us as a free people with women casting ballots.  Adrian lived to see it, bless him, and died not long after I came back. His wife had already passed and their children had all gone off to the cities without much of a thought for their peculiar Aunt Brighid.  I stayed home for a few years, until I met a nice family at church who could use all the extra space Adrian had built on to the house and wouldn’t look a gift horse too closely. I told them much what I’d told him, and they were grateful, and were good stewards of the land I’d begun to buy back, acre by acre.

 

I went to the city, worked as a secretary and read everything I could until women could go to the universities.  I hadn’t forgotten what she’d told me: _I want you to feel the life of the earth, the seasons for the coming decades._ I was moving ever closer to home, to the land. I studied the sciences of living things, botany and biology, and when universities started to hire women as professors, I found that the roving life of an academic suited me very well: I worked somewhere for a few years, came home for a bit, and found a new position and started over again.  

 

All the while I lived as simply as I could.  I had to go home, to be ready for him when he came back and to try to honor the old mother’s wishes.  I bought up as much of the land around the farm as I could, restoring it to the size I’d only heard about from when my father was still young, to afford myself privacy and solitude after the last of the large family left and I knew it was near, or near enough, time for me to come home.  

 

And then I did, with ten years to spare, from three years studying cherry trees in America.  I had two of the saplings shipped home; I didn’t know if they would make it, but I thought I’d try.  I would stay home from then onward. The house had more than doubled in size, and I modernized everything.

 

And by then it was, improbably enough, in vogue somehow to have a small working farm again, and I bought chickens for the old coops, and planted herbs and potatoes, and with great satisfaction made a very good deal for a pair of cows.  Somehow I came round full circle. Bittersweet it was to think of how delighted my parents would have been to see me holding the farm after all this time, seeing it prosper again, to say nothing of the fact that I’d learned more than writing my name and doing simple figures.  

 

And I stayed busy, as much as I could.  Because when I was still, it was all I could do not to tear down to the little graveyard on the hillside overlooking the sea and rip the earth open with my bare hands in search of him.  

 

I did everything I was meant to do, then.  I held the land and then some, until I could live off it again.  I prayed; I never stopped going to church. It has always fallen to women to manage earthly affairs, and to wait.  


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to rembrandtswife for giving the last chapter a good once-over.

She set me to chopping wood for fifty years, reminding me of the old stories of the Cailleach gathering fuel for her hearth.  Was it better than mining? There was fresh air and birdsong, but there was also the weather. I chopped in the summer sun and the snows of winter, in wind that chapped my face and hands and rain that came down in sheets.  The rain was the worst, peeling off my wet clothes to dry them before the fire and then wrapping myself in the skimpy blanket, and eating whatever scraps were lying around after working all day. I often went to bed cold and slept poorly, only to find myself breaking my back again less than twelve hours later.  

 

Still I woke up new every morning.  Still I tried to remember how long I’d been working.  Still I tried to tell myself that Brighid would forgive me even this, leaving her alone for so long and asking her to wait.  

 

And one morning, before I could strike my axe into yet another tree, Danu came to me.  “Good morning,” she said.

 

“Good morning, Mother,” I returned, cautiously.  “Is everything well?”

 

“Oh, yes,” she said.  “Your conduct has been exemplary.  In fact— ” She paused, and offered me a small smile.  “Yesterday, your debt was paid.”

 

I blinked, and set down my axe against the tree.  “Yesterday?” I echoed.

 

She nodded.  

 

“But?”

 

“But what?”

 

“You haven’t said what happens next,” I said.

 

She nodded again.

 

“So.  She chose not to wait for me.”

 

She sighed and hung her head for a moment, and oh, if I had had a heart, it would have broken.  All for nothing. All to be in this limbo for the rest of eternity. She might have even thrown me into the fire anyway.  

 

“Well,” I said.  I looked around the floor of the forest for a long moment.  “I guess I’ll… I’ll get back to work then? What else is there for me to do?”

 

She looked down with me; then, meeting my eyes, she grinned. “Oh, I’ll just hate to see you go,” she says, squeezing my arm playfully.  “But a vow is a vow. She’s been waiting for you. So it’s time to send you back.”

 

And then I did have a heart again.  I knew I did, because I felt it leap in my chest.  “Mother,” I gasped. “Really? Was that necessary?”

 

“Call it a point of privilege,” she said, giggling.  “All right, my child. Let me send you with a blessing, if you’ll have it.”

 

I sighed and knelt before her, because I could do no else even then.  I accepted the blessing she laid on my forehead, then on my hands and lips.

 

“Love her well,” she said.

 

“Mother, I will. And thank you.”

 

“You’ll need to complete one more labor,” she adds.  “Just so you know.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Why, you’ll need to dig yourself out, of course,” she said.  “I’ve gotten it started just enough for you to have some air. But look at those arms.”  She squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll make it.”

 

She pushed me, hard, to the ground.

 

I woke up with my mouth full of dirt.

 

*

 

How they buried me: deep, by the sea.  It takes me hours to dig out, gasping for air in the small pockets she began in the damp, cool soil, and when I finally breathe clear in the world for the first time in one hundred fifty years, I thrill to the cold, clean feel of the air: no smell of the earth as it burned millions of years ago, no flesh consumed by heat.  My eyes squint and blink, seeing light again; my lungs tire quickly, but breathing is a miracle and I am so grateful for it.

 

It is late fall, perhaps early winter.  One hundred fifty years to the very day, it seems.  Her magic preserved not only my body but also my burial shroud, for which I’m certainly grateful as I emerge into the world and hastily wrap it around myself, knotting it firmly around my middle.  My feet on the ground— I plant my heels in the earth, chilled, slightly damp, to anchor my body there for a moment. Her magic did a lot for me, but still, standing again takes some effort. Then walking— my hips are stiff, my legs uncertain, but I will myself forward, a strong breeze blowing my hair and my shroud towards the sea.  

 

It’s cold but I can hardly care.  Everything is different as I look towards the water— new roads, and machines moving over them.  Houses in blocks, stories upon stories. Everything is new— how can anything, anyone I knew have survived?  I come upon the meadow, fenced in all around, where the house was— where it _is,_ I can see, as my eyes focus, the woods beyond the house where I once ran thinking to die becoming individual trees as I get closer.  And I can see that the meadow isn’t just a meadow; beyond the two cows grazing I see small, neat plots, the crops mostly harvested by now of course but bearing signs of life nonetheless, the soil dark and freshly turned.

 

I run.  My legs barely hold up beneath me, but I run until it feels like they’ll give out and shatter.  

 

And then I am at her door, clinging to the post, catching my still-new breath. The house is dark, but there is the vibration of places that comes from it, places not vacated, places that might breathe with love again.

 

I knock.

 

She comes to the door and opens it.  She’s dressed— what, are those _trousers?_ What world is this with my Brighid in blue trousers?  Whatever world it is, I adore it. God, her _legs._ She holds a cup in her hand; her hair, always modestly bound all those years ago, falls loose around her shoulders like it did in the night.  Her white feet are bare. A gray cat mews around her ankles. When she meets my eyes, the cup falls from her hands and shatters on the stone floor.

 

“Jesus Christ,” she whispers.  “It can’t be.”

 

Hanging on to the post still, all I can do to stay upright is nod.  I have no words at all to tell her— to even begin.

 

Her eyes fill with tears.  “It came true, what you told me,” she said.  “Danu came to me. I thought it was a trick, a joke.  That I’d dreamed it in all my grief for you.”

 

“But you still said yes.”

 

She wiped her eyes.  “I woke up this morning and— I was afraid to leave the house.  Because I knew today was the day. I hoped, but I still didn’t know—” She paused, gulped, took a deep breath. “It’s been a long day.  The longest day.” She looked up at me. “You’re filthy.”

 

“I had to dig myself out.”

 

She breathes in sharply.  Her hand flies to the shallow at the base of her neck.

 

“Well, come in, then,” she says.  “You can— ” She pauses. “I can wash you, inside.  You won’t believe what we’ve got in houses these days.  Hot water. Just turn a knob and it comes out. You can take a lovely bath every day if you like.  So much has changed. And that’s just the beginning.”

 

“So much,” I agree.  “Those machines on the road?  And _trousers?_ And— ”

She pulls me inside, closes the door, pushes me up against the wall, and kisses me, standing on tiptoes, and as she does so she begins to weep.  “Everything’s changed,” she whispers through her tears. “Except this. Except this.”

 

“I know.”  I weep along with her.  “Oh, Brighid.”

 

“You’re home,” she murmurs into my chest.  “Home. You came home.”

 

“I said I would.”

 

She clings to me for a long moment, her tears running down my chest as sweat had done every day for the past century and a half.  When she finally steps away, she cries out in pain— “Oww, for heaven’s sake” — she’s cut herself on one of the shards of porcelain on the floor.  Drops of blood bead along her foot and puddle on the floor.

 

“Here.  Shh.” With what strength I don’t know I lift her gently to take her weight off her feet and help her on to the step nearby, then sit down beside her and tear off a piece of the shroud and tie it around her foot.  

 

“I’ll wash it when we get upstairs,” she says. “Wouldn’t you know it.  I’ll shuffle along.”

 

“Between the two of us, we’ll get up there somehow.”

 

“You— you’re not quite steady on your feet.”

 

“Not quite,” I agree.

 

We laugh then, like we once did, when everything seemed impossible.  She lays her head in my lap. “Michael,” she says. “I’m so tired.”

 

“I know.  I am too. We’ll rest well tonight.”

 

“Let’s help each other up these stairs and get ourselves cleaned up.”  She pauses. “I didn’t _know,_ you know _._ Not for sure. Until you knocked on— until I _opened_ the door.  All day. And I’m combing my hair, washing my face, feeding the cat, wondering, all day.”

 

“She never told me, you know,” I say.  “If you’d decided to wait for me. Not until today.”

 

She looks up at me, her red cheek on my knee.  “You had to wait, too,” she says.

 

“Of course.”

 

She brushes her hair out of her face.  It falls down my leg, almost to my feet.  “All right,” she says. “Come on then, husband.  We’ve waited long enough.”

 

Both of us struggle to our feet, me grasping the rail and she grasping me.  We shuffle up the stairs, holding on to each other for dear life.

 

*

 

This _room._ She says, “It’s a bathroom— every house has one now.  Even the poorest of the poor. I just updated it recently.”  She unwraps the cloth from her foot and washes it with soap from a bottle, and dries it off with some kind of paper cloth.  “I’ll run a bath and… we can… clean you up.” She turns a knob and water begins to gush from a faucet. She tucks her hair behind her ears, bites her lower lip for a moment.  

 

“You all right, then?”

 

She takes a deep breath, her hurt foot hovering tenderly just above the floor.  “It’s been a long time is all.”

 

“It has,” I agree.  “And the only way I passed that long time is by looking forward to this day.  And I don’t want to waste a moment. So come here.”

 

She does.

 

I lift off the shirt she’s wearing— so simple, no buttons or laces, just a tunic with short sleeves, soft, purple.  And no stays underneath, just a strap crisscrossing her breasts. Women’s dressing has gotten less complicated to be sure.  Still. “What’s this?” I ask.

 

“It’s a brassiere.  You just— ah, here.”  She turns round and shows me where it hooks together.

 

“I’ll be.”  I unhook it, freeing her breasts, as heavy and lovely as I remember.  “Tell me about all this. Is this what women are wearing these days, then?”

 

“More or less.  I still have some dresses and skirts for dressing up, but we started wearing trousers, oh, maybe seventy or eighty years ago now.”

 

“Well, no one’s got legs like you in them, for certain.”  There’s a button just below her navel; I undo it, then— “What’s _this,_ then?”

 

“A zipper.  You just pull it down.”

 

“Any other innovations in women’s garments I need to know about?”

 

“I’ll let you know, for heaven’s sake, shut up and kiss me.”

 

I do.  She pushes the trousers down her hips, mindful of her foot, then another little scrap of cloth over her womanly parts which she also pushes down, and finally she’s there, hooking her small hands inside the shroud around my waist and loosening it.  And we hold our bodies together as the room grows warmer with the heat of our bodies and, it seems, the heat of the water, steam rising from the tub.

 

“Come on,” she says, taking me by the hand.

 

*

 

I take him by the hand.  “Come on,” I say, and he does, and we sit in the warm water.  I remember when I redid the bathroom, and I said: _I want the biggest, deepest bathtub you can fit in here._ I couldn’t have known, of course, that it would happen this way.  And yet— The dirt begins to float away, at least the top layer, but he needs a good washing nonetheless.  

 

I pour out some of my lemony face wash onto a washcloth and start to wipe his face, brushing dirt from his eyebrows and the slight beard he’d had when— “My God,” I say. “You were in the ground.  For so long.”

 

“Only so long.”

 

I wash his neck like he’s a child— “Bend your head forward,” and he does so, and I wash behind his ears and under the hair that curls down towards his shoulders.  He moans softly.

 

“Ah, love, I’d do it all again just to feel you wash my neck like this.”

 

“I’ll remember that.”  

 

“I’ll remind you.”

 

I switch to my sage shower gel and take a fresh washcloth— the first one’s already filthy.  “How many kinds of soap do you have here, anyway?” he asks.

 

“A few.  It’s a lot easier than it used to be.  I don’t make it at home now, I just buy it in the shop.”

 

“You’ll tell me all about it.”

 

“You’ll see all of it.  All the ways things are different, big and small.”

 

“I hope they don’t try to hang me again.”

 

I smile at that.  “Ah, well, there’s no danger of that. There’s no one alive to remember, and even if they were— we’re a free country now.”

 

“Free?  Of the English, you mean?”

 

“I do.  There’s so much for you to see, and learn…” I scrub his shoulders, his chest, his arms.  My God, but I always loved his arms. Slowly his flesh becomes clear to me again— light-brown-freckled, the soft down of the hair on his chest that comes into a point at his navel and then spreads again towards his loins.  

 

“What did _you_ do for all this time?” he asks.  “The house, it’s— it’s the same but it _isn’t._ And you’re the same, but— _not,_ I just want to know everything.”

 

“I’ll make it brief, for now.  We’ll have time for everything later.”  I shampoo his hair and tell him about my travels, my education, my improving the house and expanding the property.  He shakes his head as I run my fingers over his scalp.

 

“Brighid, you’re a wonder.  You always were.”

 

“I’m not.  It’s been a lot of hard work is all.”  I pause. “There’s more, too. People now, we— what happened to me, we talk about it, now.   I didn’t talk about it, for years. I just— there was always work to do. And then… you know, at the university in America, I went to this group, with— women, mostly, but other folks too— and I talked about it.  For the first time with anyone but you.”

 

He nodded.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been here with you,” he says.  “Did it help, then?”

 

I rinse his hair.  “There were such terrible stories,” I say.  “The shame that people carry from it. You never shamed me.  No one did.” I comb his hair out of his face with my fingers.  “It was so awful, and then doubly so after— but it might have been so much worse.  I didn’t want to be with anyone else, and I carried none of the shame some others did.”

 

“You didn’t want to be with anyone else?”

 

I shake my head.

 

“It was a long time to wait.”

 

“And you were faithful to me.”  


“Well, there was no one.  I was alone most of the time.  You were in the world.”

 

I shrug.  “I was waiting for you,” I say.  “That’s all I needed.”  


He presses his hands together, almost in prayer, holds them in front of his mouth for a moment, and I can see him holding back tears.  I take his hands in mine and kiss them.

 

“You’re clean now,” I say.  “Now take me to bed.”

 

*

 

She wrapped up her foot again and, leaning on his arm, she went with him to bed.  Off they went, this man I watched over for so long and his wife. Their love was a rare one, and I was glad to help them.  

 

Oh, sure, I had to be hard on him.  Can’t have the human beings running around meting out justice according to their own whims.  Had to make sure he took me seriously, counted on me for both his joy and his pain for all those years.

 

And I was curious.  Hadn’t paid much attention to his little wife, wondered if the ones who fixed their eyes so firmly on the heaven of the foreigners’ god could have such faith in an earthly love.

 

They both surprised me, her even more than him.  He might have broken down a bit from time to time, but find a man with the presence of mind to call on the old mother and pledge to work off his debt in the face of certain death, he won’t scare easily.  I had no doubt he’d follow through.

 

But her?  When I found her she’d have been glad to die.  Said so herself. Where that strong, collected woman he spoke of was, I couldn’t see.  Do I take credit, then, for giving her her life back, too? For inspiring her to be quick, to keep moving, to improve herself, to survive?  Don’t mind if I do.

 

The both of them are the better for it.  They worked until the grave itself couldn’t conquer their love.

 

What happens now?  Look:

 

The room is different but the bed is the same.  I’ve looked in on her very quietly from time to time, watching her repair it, wash and fold the old quilt.  

 

Their bodies are young now.  The time of my magic is over now, of course, and in the blink of my eye they’ll grow old.  But for now, they are as young as they were on their wedding night. He is tall, still lithe, but strong.  She is small, but full. He cups her breasts in his hands, kisses her.

 

Her toes curl into the cool floor as the sun sets behind them.  

 

He takes her hands in his, squeezes them for a moment.

 

I’ll go now.  I’ll let her finish telling the rest of the story, she who waited so long to tell it.  

 

The world is as cold as the grave, in the end, which is why it’s not so bad to shed a little heat and light wherever I can.  With their help, of course.

 

*

 

I light the candles on the dresser and join him in bed.  I stride his lap for a moment, lean in to kiss his neck, his chest, my hair sweeping down over him.  He reaches for me, pressing his thumb gently between my legs and stroking me, warming me up.

 

“Did you remember this?” I ask him.  “You always liked to see me up here.”

 

“Whenever I could.  With pleasure.” With his free hand he touches my cheek.  “I remembered everything. Not just this. She liked to hear stories about you.  I told her about walking the cow out in the woods, even.”

 

“You didn’t.  For heaven’s sake.  That cow.”

 

“I remembered everything.  And how lovely you feel round my hand, for certain.”  He reaches his fingers to cup me in his whole palm. “So warm.  I was cold so often.”

 

“Mmmm.  Kiss me there?”

 

“Bring yourself up here.”

 

I do, and he fits his mouth around me and in no time at all I’m moaning, my whole body curling in and out of itself with happiness.  I know more now, of course, than I once did— which was nothing, to be honest, on our wedding night— of all the ways of love, but to make love as we once did is more than enough for me tonight.  “That’s a good girl, love,” he murmurs. “Shall you get yourself back up on me, then?”

 

“Yes, yes.”  And I pull him into me, and we are together again in every way, close and warm, such that nothing and no one will tear us apart again.  

 

When we finish, and I’m lying next to him with my head on his shoulder, I pray, as I have every night for the last hundred and fifty years: _Forgive me._ If there was evil in what I did, well— I promised, before God and everyone, _till death do us part._ If it was not death, if he remained alive in some way, in some world beyond, I was meant to wait, and to work.  

 

Yes, as our bodies tremble back into place in our marriage bed, I ask for forgiveness again.  But as the candles burn down around us, as he stirs a little and wonders what there might be to eat (and I laugh, because now, of course, there’s anything he might want, both from the earth right outside and anywhere else in the world), I decide that it must be for the last time.  If I’m not to be forgiven, I’ll live and die knowing that I fulfilled every imaginable condition of my vows; that in doing so, I won him back from some kind of death, and I will have him until it comes for us again.

 

“Come on,” I say, taking him by the hand.  “Let me show you what there is.”


End file.
